Consumerist reader James pays a decent chunk of change every month for his Verizon FiOS service, so when he got a letter from Big Red offering to save him $4/month on his bill — “no strings attached” — by bundling his two HD receivers into one payment, he jumped at the chance, only to find out he was never entitled to the discount in the first place.

Following two “achingly long” phone calls with FiOS customer service, James was finally given the bad news.

“Apparently one of my HD boxes is also a DVR box, which makes it different somehow,” he writes to Consumerist. “Of course, on each call I was offered an upgrade to multi-room DVR, an online gaming package and other amazing ‘deals’ that I could sign up for.”

Given the specificity of the letter, shouldn’t Verizon have known beforehand that James wouldn’t qualify for the discount? He’s not convinced the whole thing wasn’t just an excuse to get him on the phone so the company could try to upsell him on other products.

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